Garth Hallberg - City on Fire

“What are you doing back here, then? You should be rubbing elbows with the beautiful people. You know Norman Mailer’s out there.” She chucked him on the sleeve of his too-small jacket. Maybe this was overly familiar, as she’d only met him that once, but at least there was someone here who owed no loyalty to the Goulds.

“I didn’t last ten minutes. One woman handed me this.” He pulled from a pocket a crumpled napkin, a tiny bindle of half-eaten food. “I think she thought I was a waiter.”

“That dinner jacket can’t have helped. Is that William’s?”

His smile, even embarrassed, was lovely, she saw. “You think it’s too much?”

“At least you get a nice story to tell, when you go back to your other life. Me, I don’t get to go back to anything else. This is my other life.”

“It seems to agree with you.”

“Does it?” She raised her hands to her face. One of them — hands or face — was still hot, but she couldn’t have said which for certain. It was generally a warning sign when her body and her head disconnected from each other. “That’s just the booze. Speaking of which, we should have a drink.” She had taken a wine-bottle from the table between them and was scanning the countertops for an opener.

“Are you sure you need another drink?”

She rummaged through an all-purpose drawer, ignoring the peripheral consternation of the servers. “To celebrate finding each other. It really is a nice surprise.”

She couldn’t locate a corkscrew, but there, among rubber bands and wire whisks and paintbrushes, the hidden disorder of Felicia’s household, was an underweight Swiss Army knife. She flipped out the various appendages. Corkscrew, corkscrew … You would have thought the Swiss would have prepared for this contingency, but the best she could find was a long, narrow blade. She plunged it into the cork and began a little manically to prize it out.

“Uh — Regan?” Mercer said, and reached for her. And that was when the knife folded back toward the handle. There was a moment after the cutting edge had already gone through the skin and into the meat of her thumb (but before the alarm signals out in the neurochemical vastness had reached her) when it could have been someone else’s finger caught there, or a piece of anatomical wax. Geez, she thought. That looks deep. And then there was a nearly audible fizz as the future she’d been projecting for herself — a glass of wine; a toast shared with Mercer Goodman; a flight from the party, undetected by Amory — dissolved, and the thumb became hers. Blood came, a gout, a freshet on the gray-white marble between them. It was shocking that something so thick and red could come from her body. Here she’d been thinking that her life was not her own, and all the while it beat on within her. There was that second of almost giddiness, always, before you felt the pain.

CHARLIE’D BEEN TRYING TO ACTlike tonight was no big deal — like he went to nightclubs all the time — but in fact he’d been counting on Sam to sherpa him through the country of velvet ropes and mirror balls he imagined waited. Instead, here he was, utterly alone, at the back of a hot black room packed like a subway car. The stage was invisible; all he could see up there were shoulders, necks, heads, and in the spaces between, a nimbus of light, a sporadic microphone stand or fist or spray of — what was that, spit? — rising into the air. The music, too, was murky, and without the deciduous rings of an LP to study, it was hard to tell where one song ended and another began, or whether what he was hearing were actual songs. The best he could do was face the same direction as everyone else, bop up and down in some semblance of rhythm, and hope no one noticed his disappointment. And who was going to notice? The bartender was the only person farther from the stage. Charlie stripped off his jacket and tried to knot its sleeves around his waist the way kids at school did, but it fell to the floor, weighed down by the pajama bottoms in the pocket, and now there was someone watching, a girl, so he had to pretend to have meant to let the jacket fall, that’s how passionate he was about the music. He put on his most impressive scowl and tried to imagine what it might look like to be transported.

“Fuck,” the girl said, when the band’s set finally ended.

Was she talking to him? “What?”

“Groovy, right?” Recorded music now blasted from the PA; a snarl of Christmas lights above the bar had been plugged back in, doubled by those parts of a long mirror not covered in spraypaint, and the crowd was surging toward them, water in a sloshed bowl. The girl was tall — though not as tall as Sam — and plumply curvy beneath an oversized Rangers jersey. Her features were soft and womanly. “But I think you’re standing on someone’s coat.”

“Oh, I … that’s mine.” He stooped to retrieve it from a puddle of what he could only hope was beer. When he stood back up, the girl was exchanging frantic charades with someone across the room. Probably making fun of him; Charlie thought he’d detected the international symbol for drunk — thumb to mouth, pinky lifted like an elephant’s trunk. Well, screw her. “I’m going to go stand over here now,” he said.

“No, wait.” She grabbed the upper part of his sleeve. “I like the way you dance. Like you don’t give a shit who sees you. You’re not one of these grad-school poseurs just trying to fit in. People are afraid to let themselves go crazy like that anymore.”

She must be on something, Charlie thought, to make her eyes glassy like that, with the Christmas lights glimmering there like cheap stars; something that made her seem older and cooler than he was. He shrugged. “They’re only like one of my favorite bands.”

“Get the Fuck Out?”

“Beg pardon?”

“If you like Get the Fuck Out, wait till you hear the headliner.”

His mistake embarrassed Charlie. No wonder he hadn’t liked it that much. “No, that’s what I meant,” he said. “Ex Post Facto. Or Nihilo.”

“ Nihilo, ” she said, with a short i.

“Sure. They’re the best.”

“Really? My boyfriend does their sound. I could probably get you backstage. But you’d have to do something for me in return. Oh, fuck. I love this song. Come dance with me.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

“Call me S.G.,” she said over her shoulder as she forced her way past eddies of punks.

“Charlie,” he said, or mumbled. Then the record changed. A voice like an old friend’s came over the speakers: Jesus died / for somebody’s sins, / but not mine. In the graffiti’d mirror above the bar, he still looked a mess, but someone apparently thought different, and who cared if she was a little overweight? His only regret was that Sam wasn’t around to see him.

They danced near a chest-high two-by-four running along the wall. Charlie might not even have noticed it except for the lemminglike rows of plastic cups crowded there, ice in various colors melting against the sides. He took one of the drinks so S.G. wouldn’t see he was underage. It was hard to remember himself that he was only seventeen, a timorous weed sprouting from his combat boots. As the song neared escape velocity, Charlie did, too. Impossible, that this was the same place he’d felt so lonely minutes before. In every direction were people, musky, funky, undulant. And here was this broad soft broad in her oversized jersey, boogieing closer, and when his chest accidentally smooshed against her tits, she just smiled, like there was a TV on the wall behind him and she’d seen something funny. Charlie tipped back the last of his translucent blue goo and with it still numbing the roof of his mouth and luffing the surface of his face away from his skull, he put an arm around her. “I’m glad you decided to talk to me,” he yelled. He was just assaying the wisdom or stupidity of explaining how he’d been stood up when she raised a finger to his mouth.